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Building a World Fit for Children

Building a World Fit for Children

Twenty years after the launch of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we must do more to listen to vulnerable children

by

Marie Staunton

To 13-year-old Mumo Katumo, the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC) is an utter irrelevance. For the past year Mumo and her family
have been struggling to stay alive in the drought-ridden Masinga
district of eastern Kenya with little food or water and with no hope of
going to school.

Mumo describes the pain of her hunger: "You go
numb. You lose the ability to do anything. Sometimes I think it is like
the feeling of dying."

Yet the convention was introduced to help
children like Mumo, boys and girls who face a daily battle for survival
in the face of extreme poverty. Twenty years ago, as director of
Amnesty UK, I remember attending the London launch of the CRC and
making a grand speech about this first binding piece of international
law meant to help and protect children such as Mumo. Two decades later
there is still much work to do.

The good news is that the
widespread treatment of simple infant illnesses means three million
more children survive each year than was the case in the 1980s. Huge
advances made in the battle against debilitating diseases such as polio
prove what can be done by a concerted worldwide effort, yet still a
child under the age of five dies every three seconds from a largely
preventable death. That's nine million children - 98% of whom live in
the developing world. Young people are on the front line of climate
change, their small bodies more vulnerable to the floods, typhoons and
droughts that have all increased in intensity and number during the
last 20 years.

An estimated 160 million of the next generation of
children will also be at risk of catching malaria and about 900 million
will be affected by increasing water shortages. Meanwhile the global
financial crisis has hit the poorest countries worst, the World Bank
estimates that 50,000 more babies will die in sub-Saharan Africa
this year, the majority of them girls. Where are their rights? It's
true to say that 28 million more children go to school now than did 20
years ago, but children with disabilities and secondary school girls
are too often unable to access a full education and realise their
potential.

And defending the rights of our youngest citizens
isn't just a developing world issue, in parts of Europe Roma children
are labelled as mentally deficient and banished from mainstream school.

Here
in the UK, in the recession, the number of children with both parents
out of work has gone up 18% and there is real pressure on the parents
of the 2.3 million children living in poverty.

Over the last two
decades the world has turned from being largely rural to being mostly
urban with the rise of the sprawling mega cities. A new city the size
of Birmingham is created every week, makeshift slums spring up
overnight with no thought for the needs and rights of children. Dirty
drinking water, poor sanitation, few schools and dangerous street work
all put children at risk.

Participation - letting children have a
say in decisions made about them - was always the most controversial
part of the convention, but I believe this is actually the key to
ending child neglect, cruelty and abandonment.

Practising as a
children's lawyer I found that children have a view and experience very
different from that of adults. They have a valuable and much-needed
opinion to add to debates about the development of their communities
and they should be heard. Several years ago I met a group of young
people from Honduras who were so distressed by their fathers' drinking
and violence that they successfully campaigned to close their local
bars. In Albania the children's parliament successfully got the state
drinking age raised.

But sadly in the UK, and despite the
excellent work of youth parliaments and similar group, we have
increasingly demonised children as "feral youths", criminalised their
behaviour and ignored their views on lack of safe public spaces to
congregate. So in this patchwork of progress and setbacks, has the
Convention on the Rights of the Child been useful? Undoubtedly.

Children
in countries that have emerged from conflict in the last two decades,
from South Africa to most recently Montenegro, are better protected
because new constitutions include the CRC framework.

Child
soldiers, although tragically they still exist, are no longer invisible
and there is now a duty for every country to ensure every child
survives, is protected and can develop and have a say in decisions made
about them - although sometimes honoured more in the breach than the
observance.

Admittedly the weaknesses for which the convention
was criticised 20 years ago, the lack of a remedy for an individual and
the wide-ranging reservations of some states have hampered its
implementation. If we are serious about building a world fit for
children, now is the time to create a way for them to take complaints
to the convention's monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Children
are not mini human beings with mini human rights, they need proper
remedies. It is time for the CRC to make rights a reality for children
such as Mumo Katumo.

Marie Staunton is chief executive of Plan International UK. Children
are at the heart of the long term grassroots development work that Plan
carries out together with some 96000 communities in over 50 developing
countries

Further

Whew. That was way too close for comfort. And yeah, the country's in a sorry state to have come to this. But not only does Doug Jones become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Alabama in 25 years; his win is a blunt rejection of all the hate-mongering, gay-bashing, race-baiting, sexual-assaulting, serial lying crap of losers Moore and Trump and Bannon and their ugly ilk. Forward to mid-terms. And once and for all, to Moore in all his evil: "Fuck you and the horse you (badly) rode in on."